A Little Stranger Page 3

  Our farm produced meat, the garden vegetables, we had milk and eggs and the cook made bread. I wondered sometimes whether these things were too physical for Margaret to bear.

  In my pregnancy, I grew fatter at the waist and continued to eat, as I always had, fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness.

  Chapter 6

  Christmas consolidated the happiness in the house. I stopped worrying about our felicity and settled to getting and spending.

  We had two Christmas trees that year, one for ourselves and one for John and Margaret. He had decorated their tree with baubles and tinsel, which Margaret had chosen. Their tree was gayer than our own. They had spent a morning in the local town choosing frosty globes enclosing Bambis, and clip-on birds with smooth glass-fibre brushes for tails. She had painted a crib-set and given the eaves of the stable glitterdust for snow. The manger had a nicely sewn duvet of straw-coloured cloth, the size of a pictorial rather than simply monarchist stamp.

  ‘I’m baby-minded,’ said Margaret, placing the infant Jesus.

  She was to spend Christmas at her home.

  ‘We shall all miss you,’ I said, as we handed over our presents the evening before Christmas Eve. She had done more than she need to prepare things for us and was now driving off to help her parents with their celebrations. It was a strenuous time for her but she loved it. She had left a list for me, of outstanding preparations which could not be done too far in advance.

  After we had said goodbye, John with kisses and my husband and I with boxed dainties and loud voices, I took out the list, which was written on her now-familiar paper. She dotted her ‘i’s with circles like birds’ eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t lose her for all the world,’ said my husband, and he stretched and looked as self-satisfied as a painted paterfamilias.

  I told him this. He was pleased and announced, ‘I’m looking forward to this Christmas more than to any other so far.’

  I agreed.

  I took Margaret’s list upstairs, where I went to turn off the tiny lights on John’s small tree, now he was asleep. The sense of suspended sweetness in the new dark was like a songbird covered with its dark night-time cloth.

  The list read:

  24th Dec. Remember to rest for baby. Feet up. Cook off. 8 pm, peel potatoes and put under water, Brussels peeled and x’d? 10 pm, Johnny’s stocking in my second drawer down. 11 pm, bird in slow oven of Aga. 12 pm, midnight mass. Say a prayer for Margaret!!

  25th Dec. Bird in hot oven (did you take it out after mass?) at 10 am. 11 am, church. J.’s British warm airing in boiler room, shoes etc. ready. Collection in glove. 1 pm, eat a good dinner. No bread sauce. Onion bad for baby – and Mummy. 3 pm, John’s and my gift to you in nursery kitchen pan cupboard. 4 pm, no more than two (2) mince pies for J. No brandy butter. Custard ready in fridge. Does not eat skin. 6 pm, drinks tray for villagers ready, except ice.

  26th Dec., ‘Boxing Day’. M. back. PHEW!

  At the bottom, with the two ducks and their duckling, she had drawn a turkey, recognisable by his clerical wattles, uncooked, alive, raising his right drumstick in an avian – and presumably cannibalistic – grace.

  I could not imagine what we would do without her.

  Chapter 7

  Asked about her own Christmas with her family, Margaret gave little away. It was as though her own home life did not enter the third dimension. She did not speak of her parents in the round. She appeared to have no childhood memories. When she released details, they were flat and lifeless as details from an instruction leaflet. It was as though she described self-assembly furniture. None the less, she wrote frequently to her family and to her boyfriend. She left her letters with mine, for the postman to pick up. My letters were to old friends, when they did not contain cheques.

  I had also taken to writing enthusiastic letters to people I had admired on the television or had heard on the radio. I agreed with or differed so acutely from people I’d never heard of that I had to write to them. I was sheepish if they replied; by then I had generally forgotten them.

  At New Year we had a large party for tenants and employees. Such occasions are intended for the continued good relations between the hosts and their guests in the dealings the coming year must bring. Their aim is not solely pleasure. Our New Year party was our office party, but we and our guests lived on and from the office, the land, and for its cultivation, disposal, allotment, finance, maintenance and that of the beasts, people and wild things living on it.

  We engaged electricians to fill the garden with lights. We locked small treasures in the safe. John was interested in the safe, with its tubular oily bars and spinning combination disc.

  ‘Twenty children a year die in disused refrigerators on tips, and they don’t even lock,’ said Margaret. She had stopped spelling out words she considered unsuitable, since by now John could coarsely spell.

  ‘I could live nice in here,’ he said. For him, the safe was indeed the size of a house. ‘There are all stuff for eating.’

  ‘For eating off. Or with. Not for eating,’ I said. ‘Not for feeding off.’

  ‘We don’t say feed, we say food,’ said my son and his nanny, like an old couple doing a turn. The cream, silky hair grew like a star on John’s crown. The underhair was growing in grey-gold, the no-colour of wheat after the harvest and its hot moon. Margaret’s soft hair was dun; over one temple a bright comb showed its teeth. She smiled.

  ‘Do please bring your young man,’ my husband said to her. ‘We’ll be all sorts, most informal.’

  ‘Will you bring him?’ I asked later, at nursery tea. I would not by now have minded a more close relationship.

  ‘Who?’

  I realised I knew no name for him. I could not have been referring to anyone but her fiancé, but Margaret required clarity.

  ‘Your beau.’ She must read that sort of romance.

  She gave no reply; I might have been talking millinery. I saw clearly my own tendency to wrap up and enfold meaning, her own laudable cleanliness of mind, where all was what it seemed.

  ‘Your boyfriend. The person you hope to marry.’

  She composed her face, retrieving its features from the throes of surprise admirably quickly.

  ‘It’s very difficult; the animals he works with are very demanding.’

  ‘No more demanding than John, surely?’ I was making a joke.

  She did not appear to enjoy the suggestion that she worked with animals.

  ‘Johnny’s a real little person,’ she said, in a voice made for church.

  ‘Yes. A card,’ I replied, wondering why we denigrate what we love best, knowing it was to keep off the gods’ covetous eyes.

  I asked what she intended wearing.

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she replied, smiling with her cheeks. ‘What are you wearing, we all want to know? There’s talk of nothing but.’ We were back in the safe world of romance, hierarchy, display, garmentry.

  I was getting bigger and could be comfortable in only two of my party dresses. I had hardly changed size while pregnant with John. Unprepared to find myself so swollen in this second pregnancy, I showed Margaret the two frocks, pulled out from the fallow silks, discarded peaux d’oranges and ashes of faille roses in my dressing-room.

  It was to be either a wide black tent with a suggestion of jet at the shoulders, or a violet sheath with much orange lashing. Margaret liked the purple, and that decided me, as she was not loose with praise.

  ‘You can carry it,’ she said, and encouraged me to put it on to show her and John.

  I made up my face as it would be at our party, very pale, with an orange mouth and mauve eyelids. I tied a turban in my hair and tucked into its front a piece of jewellery the size of a fried egg, with two rashers of pavé rubies. My feet remained slim, so I put them into satin shoes with heels like knives.

  ‘Fat wicked queen,’ said John.

  ‘Pretty Mummy,’ said Margaret, her mouth neat and smacking as though at a soft centre.


  Was school bad for my son?

  The bump at my front looked like a corm. John appeared not to notice it. Margaret said he would not connect it with the baby she had told him was coming (she had explained that the news, from me, might make him jealous). I could see that it would be complicated to relate the bump and the baby in his mind without unnecessary information.

  The day before the party, snow had fallen. The house in its park looked just snowy enough, as though figured in the recollection of a sweltering expatriate. We lived in a balmy part of England, much sung in war, always photogenic, conjured at times when memory and sentiment made of wives and hearths and smoothly looping rivers something desirable in their predictability. Our valley held no scrub and no untended woodland. It was impossible, as it is not in the north, to imagine wolves. If they had been there, they would have been as sleek and tame and good with children as the supreme vulpine champion of Assisi.

  The house was terribly hot and full of noise. There was a smell of flowers and food, both meaty. People I did not know moved about with cables, drugget and keys. The policemen in their chesty dinner jackets arrived first, showing an area of shirt the shape and size of an unshriven sole.

  By six o’clock, the policemen had stopped refusing drinks.

  John went to bed at seven, very docile. I was not yet dressed for the party.

  It was to begin at ten o’clock, and before that we had a few of our own friends to dine. I kissed John, bending over at the waist where my jeans could no longer fasten and were tied with an old tie of my husband’s. My jersey was of that oily wool which cannot be washed in water, only with ash. Upon my face was a clay mask, dry as a grass court’s lines.

  ‘Mad witch,’ said John, touching my lips with his hand to make sure they were not chalky before kissing me.

  ‘John Solomon, you solemn man.’ It was an old joke, and had always worked before. John’s second name was his father’s first. Sometimes, to myself, I called him Sol. His father, in his wisdom, ruled out any such abbreviation for himself. But the shortness of children does not make them less whole. We kissed, more in the air than on the lips, and I watched him roost into his pillow, insert his shining thumb, and fall down suddenly beneath the horizon of sleep.

  Just before I dressed, Margaret came to me.

  ‘He’s unable to come,’ she said, clearly referring to her fiancé. ‘It’s a last-minute emergency. No one else has the expertise. He’s a responsible job to do.’

  I had missed the telephone’s shrill in the bustle.

  ‘I’ve put on John’s alarm,’ she said, ‘as the house will be noisier than usual. We’re all going to listen for him.’ She meant everyone who worked in the house.

  I first saw her pretty black dress when I was going down the main staircase. At a certain turn, the door of John’s room was visible.

  She was wearing shoes with high heels and seemed to be slimmer. Her hair was not frizzy, but soft. It contained colours. At her neck it waved where before there had been stubble.

  A soft bar of light from John’s room cut the corner of the dark corridor, before she closed the door and turned on the landing light.

  I smelled her scent. I had almost come to like it.

  ‘Goodnight, pretty Margaret,’ said the awakened voice of my son, the words audäible on the alarm, though distorted by amplification.

  Chapter 8

  In winter, a marquee full of dancers is a romantic thing, frivolous as a stall at an ice fair. In each corner were tied bouncing bunches of balloons, filled with a gas lighter than air. They were red like redcurrants, thin scarlet stretched with brightness. They stirred as the dancers moved, with a slow seething motion as though agglutinated in a medium of sugar sweetness.

  A group of big men used to machines for cutting through wood and earth stood in one corner, drinking. They were not yet drunk enough to dance. The wives sat in another corner, sipping sweet mixture. Among them was Margaret. She was more smartly dressed than most of them, and she held, but did not drink from, a champagne glass. She resembled a woman in a television advertisement for chocolate mints, who had fallen among women advertising something homelier, washing powder, or discounted carpeting. I felt sorry for her, without her fiancé. No doubt she had bought the black dress for him. He must be curious about her job, concerned to know whether where she worked was pleasant, her employers fair, her wages given for a reasonably restricted amount of work.

  ‘We must invite Margaret’s fiancé some time,’ I said to my husband.

  ‘Whatever for?’ he replied. ‘Does he need a job?’ He was off, elegant and menacingly jovial among his dependants in his festival clothes of white and black.

  Men slapped his back and used his Christian name and our own friends talked to each other and not to us in order to leave us free to mix, to be perceived not sticking to our own kind. I saw him move towards where the wives sat.

  ‘Come the revolution,’ he would say, ‘I’ll be a butler, no problem. I love to fetch funny drinks.’

  I saw him smiling, fetching little glasses of gold and orange and milk colours. Later, he would tell me of the most outlandish concoctions. ‘And the awful thing is, they call them names now, so I’m meant to know the constituent parts of a Snow Goose or an Open Bottom Drawer or whatever. Omo, lemonade and Cointreau, or some such.’

  He was standing, fetching, stopping, never sitting. It was a tradition at these parties that he should wait upon those who waited, every other night, upon him.

  To each wife, as he gave her her drink, he addressed some words. These women had almost all known him since he had been a boy, but now he was not only bigger than they were but looked as though he came from an altogether larger race, meat-fed and clothed in confidence. Down the sides of his trousers ran a hardly shiny silk ribbon and his feet were slippered in black velvet. Black satin faced his jacket. The many surfaces of black about him made him rich and solemn among the little women in pale dresses. Many of them wore cardigans, like children at a party, angora or snowy orlon, showing the creases where they had come from the packet.

  ‘Very nice,’ they said to me when I went over. ‘Very nice to see there’s a new addition on the way. And how is John?’

  And I could ask them about their children and grandchildren, many of whom were at the party. It was easy, being a woman, with the democratic matter of children to discuss. I was quite happy there for a time, but felt I must move on, speak to everyone. As it was her first of these parties, I must see that Margaret was all right.

  She was sitting with her back to me, her black bag set on the red-clothed table, facing one of the corners with its floating cluster of red balloons. I had to move sideways between the tables, though my height kept the bump of my belly above the backs of the little golden chairs, which appeared to be constructed of small gold femurs.

  She was speaking to one of the gamekeepers. Her champagne glass remained an untouched accessory.

  ‘He just works with animals,’ she was saying to him. The keeper was looking at her as though he wished he could describe his own job in some way which omitted all mention of animals. She was looking very pretty. Her eyes were bright, her nails pink, her femininity cocked.

  ‘Hello, Robert,’ I said. ‘Happy New Year, nearly.’

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘It could be very happy.’ He was known to ‘see to’ the wife of one of the cowmen, but he needed a wife of his own. His eyelashes reached his eyebrows and the down on his cheeks was thick; his chest escaped his shirt. He looked at Margaret, who looked at her own hands. She was not wearing her engagement ring this evening, perhaps in pique at her fiancé’s absence.

  She took out a handkerchief from her bag, kissed it, leaving a pink mouth-shape on the cotton, and returned it to the bag. Had she suddenly felt the weight of all that pink frosting? My husband joined us briefly, standing behind Margaret’s chair. The black jersey of her dress was seemly beneath his own swart radiance. I was glad she was having a nice time.

&nbs
p; ‘Look, Robert,’ he addressed the keeper. ‘She’s a nice girl to take out for an evening. Sober and cheap. You haven’t touched a drop, Margaret. It’s perfectly good, you know. The real thing.’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ she said. ‘Pleasant.’ She took a sip, leaving, mysteriously, another pink mouth mark on the rim of the glass.

  ‘Nothing could induce me to touch strong drink,’ she had said to me. Evidently she had not meant ‘no one’.

  My husband looked relieved, Robert hot and helpless. He gazed into his own glass, which contained nothing.

  ‘Let me see you right, Robert,’ said my husband. ‘What’s it to be? Black and tan?’

  Robert’s glass was a tall straight flute, on a stem.

  At midnight we released the balloons from the tethered bunches where they struggled for free air. They floated up to the roof of the marquee, bobbing against its inner membrane, striving to reach its highest points. Their ribbons hung down straight as stems from the light jostling red fruits.

  Optimistic, frail and ignorant of the future, we sang. You might have thought we were all workers in the established legal firm Auld, Laing & Syne.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning, the balloons were for John. He and Margaret and my husband and I, wrapped against the snow, collected them in the cold marquee. We three adults climbed ladders to catch the tails of the balloons, and passed these wilful bouquets down to John. He was simmering with pleasure. Margaret was wearing a hat which said, around its woolly brim, ‘Nanny Knows Best’. My husband had found it for her Christmas present.